Linguistics
is not usually introduced at the high-school level, so students who enter
college are often unaware of it as a choice.

Linguistics is the general study
of language. It addresses such questions as properties that languages have in
common; how language is learned, produced, and understood;

how languages change
through time and vary across geographic regions or social strata; and the
design of language technologies such as speech recognition, machine translation
and information retrieval.

NACLO is
currently sponsored by the US National Science Foundation, Google, the North
American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), and
Cambridge University Press.

Top scorers
in the Open Round in January will be eligible to compete in an Invitational Round on March 8, 2018.

Winners of that competition will be eligible to participate in the International
Linguistics Olympiad (ILO). This year it will take place in Prague, Czech Republic http://www.ioling.org/